Celebrating Yellowstone Park

This post was written by Marybeth Kavanagh, Reference Archivist

As a previous blog post has explained, Yellowstone National Park was established by Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872. Yellowstone was the first National Park in the U.S. and is also widely held to be the first national park in the world. So we’re celebrating by sharing these stunning images taken by photographer William Henry Jackson.

Plate 30, Palace Butte Park. Y-f 1873.Jackson

geyser crater — Plate 10, Upper Fire-Hole Basin from the Crater of “Old Faithful” Y-f 1873.Jackson

falls — Plate 18, Lower Falls of the Yellowstone. Y-f 1873.Jackson

Survey team — Plate 3, Meeting of the U.S. Geological Survey in the Lower Fire-Hole Basin. Y-f 1873.Jackson

Jackson took these photographs as part of the Department of the Interior’s Geological Survey of the Territories, headed by geologist F.V. Hayden. They were published in 1873; the library holds a copy of the volume: Photographs of the Yellowstone National Park and views in Montana and Wyoming territories.

Ærostatic Ascension by Mr. Guillé.

August 2, 2017

This post is by Anne Boissonnault, Archives Intern

August 2nd marks a particularly lofty day in New York’s history of aeronautics. On that date in 1819, Louis Charles Guillé ascended in a balloon full of hydrogen gas over Vauxhall Gardens in Manhattan (a pleasure garden and theater near present day Astor Place) and descended using a parachute. Guillé was not the first to make an ascent by balloon in the United States, a distinction which is reserved for...Read More

"A Real Santa:" the portrait photography of Theron W. Kilmer

December 24, 2013

Long before SantaCon, Theron W. Kilmer found -- and photographed -- "A Real Santa" in New York City. Although largely forgotten now, in his own time Theron W. Kilmer was aptly described as "an amazing person." He was a distinguished physician, an associate professor of pediatrics, a writer, a lecturer, an honorary police chief, a major in the New York National Guard and, for a time, the fifth ranking rifle marksman in the entire U.S....Read More

Blueprints, Then and Now

January 24, 2012

Written by Geraldine Granahan, Preservation Assistant for the McKim, Mead & White Architectural Record Collection. Recently the staff of the library and conservation department spent a fun afternoon in our conservation laboratory attending a workshop on the process of making cyanotypes, or as they are more commonly known -- blueprints (so called because they contain the pigment Prussian Blue). The pigment itself has an interesting history, having been discovered by accident in or around 1704, when a...Read More

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